A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World by Tony Horwitz

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(Hardcover)

Average Customer Rating: Customer Rating for this product is 4 out of 5 (1 ratings)

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  • Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Incorporated
  • Pub. Date: April 2008
  • ISBN-13: 9780805076035
  • Sales Rank: 1,399
  • 464pp
 
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Synopsis

On a chance visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz makes an unsettling discovery. A history buff since early childhood, expensively educated at university—a history major, no less!—he’s reached middle age with a third-grader’s grasp of early America. In fact, he’s mislaid more than a century of American history, the period separating Columbus’s landing in 1492 from the arrival of English colonists at Jamestown in 160-something. Did nothing happen in between?

Horwitz decides to find out, and in A Voyage Long and Strange he uncovers the neglected story of America’s founding by Europeans. He begins a thousand years ago, with the Vikings, and then tells the dramatic tale of conquistadors, castaways, French voyageurs, Moorish slaves, and many others who roamed and rampaged across half the states of the present-day U.S. continent, long before the Mayflower landed.

To explore this history and its legacy in the present, Horwitz embarks on an epic quest of his own—trekking in search of grape-rich Vinland, Ponce de León’s Fountain of Youth, Coronado’s Cities of Gold, Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colonists, and other mysteries of early America. And everywhere he goes, Horwitz probes the revealing gap between fact and legend, between what we enshrine and what we forget.

An irresistible blend of history, myth, and misadventure, A Voyage Long and Strange allows us to rediscover the New World for ourselves.   

The New York Times - Andrew Ferguson

…[a] funny and lively new travelogue…popular history of the most accessible sort. The pace never flags, even for easily distracted readers, because Horwitz knows how to quick-cut between historical narrative and a breezy account of his own travels. It's the same method he used in [Confederates in the Attic,] deployed with the same success, and unlike many other, less journalistic histories, in which the material is displayed at a curator's remove, it has the immense value of injecting the past into the present—showing us history as an element of contemporary life, something that still surrounds us and presses in on us, whether we know it or not. Usually not.

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Biography

Humorist and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony Horwitz's vicarious voyages span everything from modern-day Civil War re-enactments to long-forgotten courses of discovery. His charismatic chronicles of derring-do have garnered Horwitz a reputation for traveling where few men would dare to tread -- and writing about it so they don't have to.

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Number of Reviews: 1
Average Rating: Customer Rating for this product is 4 out of 5
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Customer Rating for this product is 4 out of 5 Interesting
A reviewer, A reviewer, 04/24/2008

Upon a visit to Massachusetts, Tony Horowitz is awed when he sees Plymouth Rock not out of it being grand sort of an American Gibraltar, but to realize it is not much more than a pebble. As one child points out, the Pilgrims must have had small feet to land on that rock. Tony reflects on what he knows about American history only to draw major blanks for over a century and half from Columbus until Jamestown. What frightens Tony is that he graduated with a history degree. Thus he vows to track the story of the European explorers who traveled American even before Columbus. Starting with the Vikings and following with the French and Spanish, Tony tracks those who came before Jamestown.------------ With a nod to Mr. Wuhl’s HBO special Assume The Position, Tony Horowitz goes on a reverent journey tracing the paths traveled by European explorers between 1492 and 1607. On his trek, Mr. Horowitz meets many people with a differing interpretation of events like the Spanish (St. Augustine was founded forty-two years earlier than the Plymouth Rock landing) came before the Pilgrims so America should celebrate Thanksgiving with Chili. This is a fun travelogue as Mr. Horowitz’ enthusiasm and energy add to the enjoyment quoting Mr. Wuhl: 'I shit you not'.--------- Harriet Klausner